(See front cover)
Gentlemen variously beribboned in orange, green, red, white and blue crowded last week into the lobby of Washington's Mayflower hotel—delegates from all over the U. S. to the sixty-third Convention of the American Institute of Architects, an exclusive body devoted to the preservation of professional standards, the solution of problems. For three days they were engaged in discussion.
Public interest was aroused by a debate on style between George Howe (Howe & Lescaze) of Philadelphia, upholding Modernism, and C. Howard Walker of Boston, defending Conservatism.
Said fiery Modernist Howe: "In America with its vast resources of natural and human energy in constant volcanic eruption, cities, factories, warehouses and elevators have been thrown up in towering accidental masses, as exciting as the Rocky Mountains and also as crude and little subject to esthetic control. In Europe, less disorderly but with no more discretion, most of the new districts can evoke no emotion but blank despair, and even Paris has been partially saved only by the pride of its dead tyrants. . . . The modern movement is a conscious effort to direct and canalize the stupendous energy of modern civilization between its proper architectural embankments. . . . Seizing the opportunity offered by the elimination of the requirement of gravitational stability with imagination and courage [the Modernist] has suspended about his skeleton framework a gossamer veil of glass and light building materials, and created a new style based on the old common law of architecture reformulated to meet modern needs in the light of modern economic and engineering genius."
Parried Conservative Walker: "It has been reserved for the so-called Modernists to be irritated at any resemblance to anything that has calm, and to adore excess in every direction, to be shapeless, crude, eliminated in detail to nothingness, explosive in detail to chaos . . . creating sensation with the slapstick and the bludgeon. Modernism may change the methods of architecture, but when it does it will necessarily have in it traditions of sound previous methods, with which at present it is in conflict ... at times infantile and often callow. . . . Occasionally it reaches a serious adult stage. Therefore Hope is struggling at the bottom of the open Pandora's box."
Five honorary members were elected, including John Davison Rockefeller Jr. The citation: ". . . His active interest in architecture is incarnated in the restoration of the cathedral of Rheims, the chapel of the University of Chicago . . . the American building in Luxor and the restoration of the city of Williamsburg, Va.. a project unprecedented in its scope and cost and unlimited in its possibilities as an inspiration in good architecture, patriotism and citizenship. . . ." Honorary membership was also conferred on Professor William Archer Rutherford Goodwin (William & Mary), historian & archeologist who supervised the Williamsburg restoration. The Institute's Fine Arts Medal was bestowed on Architectural Sculptor Adolph Alexander Weinman of Manhattan.